I disagree. I think a non rotating rigid Dyson sphere would be a better design, as it could capture 100% of sunlight without collisions. I calculated that a thickness of about 200-300 nm depending on material would balance radiation pressure against gravity regardless of radius. At 10,000 AU the outside temperature would be close to the cosmic microwave background, 3 K, allowing 10^48 bit operations per second at the Landauer limit. That would be fast enough to simulate 3 billion years of evolution in a few minutes. The sun outputs 3.846 x 10^26 W, enough to lift all of the Earth's mass to escape velocity in about a week.
But it won't be uploads doing this. An upload is a robot that claims to be you. Your phone has already collected enough data to train an LLM to convince others, and you won't notice any gaps in your memory. You do understand that consciousness is an illusion, right? But a Kardashev level 2 civilization is a way off. Level 1 is about 130 years away if global storage continues doubling every 3 years until it surpasses the 10^37 bits stored as DNA in the biosphere. Self replicating nanotechnology would then be able to capture 100 times as much solar energy as plants and quickly displace most DNA based life. We know this because the atmospheric carbon cycle of 210 gigatons per year is equivalent to 300 TW of carbohydrate production at 4 Kcal/g, which is 0.3% of the 90,000 TW of sunlight available at the Earth's surface. Solar panels are already 20-30% efficient. Level 2 would capture 4 billion times more energy, which would be another century away (about 2250) if we naively assume Moore's law to continue that long. But I think it is more likely that progress will halt because we solve alignment, AI gives us everything we want, we reject human contact, and stop having children. We will either go extinct or evolve to reject modern technology. We can only hope that gray goo happens first. -- Matt Mahoney, [email protected] On Tue, Oct 28, 2025, 6:28 PM Alan Grimes via AGI <[email protected]> wrote: > Hey, I'm trying to test/ play with an agentic workflow with OpenHands > and my collection of local LLMs, really nasty piece of software, even on > Linux with the most developer-friendly distribution I can think of... > > Anyway, what I really want to talk about is that the goddamn uploaders > are starting to come out of hibernation and crawl out of their > hidey-holes and starting to test the waters again with talk of > converting the solar system to a dyson swarm... > > =( > > HEY UPLOADERS!!! YOU DO NOT OWN THE SOLAR SYSTEM. Want a nice big rock > somewhere to turn into a server farm? How about 2 Pallas, nice little > rock. Ceres seems to have water ice so that could be a human > colonization target but 2 Pallas is pretty dry so go upload yourself to > that and leave the 95% of the human race that does not want to upload > alone!! > > -- > You can't out-crazy a Democrat. > WhY aRe ThEy KiLlInG tEh ChIcKeNs? > White is the new Kulak. > Powers are not rights. > ------------------------------------------ Artificial General Intelligence List: AGI Permalink: https://agi.topicbox.com/groups/agi/Tb9db111bc59c6629-M1a4cae209404163277aae085 Delivery options: https://agi.topicbox.com/groups/agi/subscription
